I've been working on my Katakana for the last few hours, and I've now got to the nice place where it all suddenly clicks into place, and it's almost a shock when I realise that "hey, I actually know what all these symbols are". I think there are a couple of factors here ( Read more... )

Today I've been going through "take off in Japanese" - it's a book/CD pack from Oxford University Press which I bought last year before I started classes, and this is the first time I've really tried using it. It's proving quite useful as a revision aid for the things we did last term (e.g. times of day), and the teaching style is growing on me. ( Read more... )

A quick round up of the last few days...

On Thursday evening I went off to the annual BCS/IEE Turing lecture - this year's talk was about the ways that technology can help/hinder disabled people, and it was very interesting. ( Read more... )

Today's Japanese class was a bit deserted - only four students turned up, out of the normal twelve. I'm guessing that the others weren't feeling confident about the test. Anyway, it was a bit harder than I'd expected, so I had to skip several questions, but afterwards the teacher said "Don't worry about it, you've all passed", so I think it was ( Read more... )

Day 8: No actual decorating today as such. I disposed of some old furniture (via Freecycle), and also had an electrician out to fix my light (although "12-2" wound up being "by 5pm"). He confirmed that the old fitting was completely broken, so there was no way that I would have been able to reattach it myself. I did consider buying a replacement ( Read more... )

Day 2 of my decorating project, and I've now applied plaster sealer in the loo/bedroom. For those who've seen my flat, that means that they're now the same blotchy brown colour as the hallway, rather than the pale pink that they were before. Unfortunately, I ran out of sealer just as I was finishing up, so the final stretch of bedroom wall is a bit ( Read more... )

Hmm, quite a long day today, filled with various short-ish things ( Read more... )

Following up on a previous entry, I've now written a little application to help me learn Hiragana. Nothing too fancy - it just works like flashcards, by picking symbols in a random order. Still, I've found it useful, so it's up on my website, and anyone else who'd like to use it is welcome to.

Well, this has been a pretty good weekend.

I went off to SOAS yesterday for my first Japanese lesson (as well as the admin stuff like getting issued with a library card). ( Japanese )

Well, another fairly busy week for me ( Read more... )